AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Has anyone stopped to think about what Israel’s ultimate intentions are for the Gaza Strip?

The Israeli settlers left it, or rather were removed reluctantly from it, in September 2005 when Ariel Sharon decided that the cost to Israel of maintaining the settlers in the Gaza Strip was far too high. In January 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections but the West decided that democracy had come up with the wrong answer so did not recognise their win and failed to support the new government preferring instead to support the corrupt Fatah faction in the Gaza which tried to wrest full control of the Gaza from the elected Hamas. They failed and, after a short battle for control, the Fatah faction leaders were kicked out. Hamas has remained in control of the Gaza ever since much to the chagrin of the Israelis who have laid siege to the Strip.

In response to the slowly strangulating siege and the ghettoising of Gaza, Hamas have kept up a mainly harmless barrage of rockets and mortar fire against Israel in an effort to get them to release their grip on the siege. In response Israel has let loose with helicopter gunships and attack aircraft against infrastructure targets that effect the entire population of the Strip as well as launching assassination attacks against Hamas leaders and operatives and other Palestinian fighters resisting the siege.

For nearly three years now the Gazan people have had to endure a steadily worsening siege that has deprived them of the very basics of living including health, fuel and food.

Yet, after all this, we have not seen in the West any comment about what the Israeli endgame is.

Let me enlighten you.

Their endgame is not getting Hamas to stop uselessly firing rockets into southern Israel. Nor is it to rid the Gaza of Hamas so that the Fatah faction can take control. To the extreme right-wing Zionists that are likely to become the next government of Israel after the elections next February, Fatah are as big an enemy as Hamas.

No mistakes should be made about what the Israelis want: They ultimately want nothing less than the entire Gaza Strip emptied of all Palestinians who will be transferred to the Sinai in Egypt, or Jordan, or the West Bank, or Lebanon. The Gaza will then be again occupied, this time solely and permanently, by Israeli settlers who will then annex the Gaza into Israel. That is the Israeli endgame. There is no other endgame with regard to the Gaza.

For months now there has been a propaganda build up toward a full-scale invasion of the Gaza by Israel. Over the past two years the Israelis have been manipulating and massaging the rhetoric about the Gaza to suit their own timetable. In the lead-up to the US presidential elections Israel held back on action to see how the political landscape would shape itself after the presidential elections. At the same time internal Israeli politics also kept major decisions on the back burner. However, now that President-elect Obama has revealed himself to be a strong supporter of Israel and the forthcoming elections in February in Israel are expected to produce a right-wing Zionist government that has no interest in a Palestinian sovereign state, the plans to move against the Gaza has been put back on the front burner.

Plans to make war against Hamas will be accompanied by the possibility of a simultaneous assault against Hezbollah and possibly even Syria. And, if that is the case, there must also be plans afoot to attack Iran.

A Middle East with President Obama in the US and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel can look forward to bleak 2009 while the peoples of the rest of the world struggles to fight off the ravages of the next Great Depression. Happy New Year?

Sunday, December 21, 2008

It is becoming clear that the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Pakistan and India has been carefully engineered by the US who plan to use the possibility of confrontation between the two nations as an excuse to ‘intervene’ in order to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The plan has immense consequences on the geo-political landscape throughout the entire region. Just by taking Pakistan’s nuclear capability out of the equation, India will become the closest ally of the US in the region – it will also become the most powerful Western allied nation in the region and right next to China to its north. The new geo-political reality will also give the US a completely free hand to attack Islamic forces in north-west Pakistan and, indeed, anywhere else in Pakistan if the situation deteriorates to the point where there is a massive Pakistani revolt against US intervention in their country. They too will no doubt be targeted as ‘terrorists’.

The problem for the US now is that they simply don’t have the wherewithal to actually take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. They have no treasure left with which to launch a full scale invasion against a country of some 173 million people, the vast majority of whom would not tolerate an American occupation, and nor do they have the manpower. The only alternative is for the US to attempt to get a compliant Pakistani government and its military to acquiesce to US demands that it hands over its arsenal for ‘safe keeping’, or lose it by having it destroyed by US missiles. Either way, there are likely to 173 million very angry Pakistanis for the government to contend with not to mention the possibility of several thousands of new recruits willing to fight with the Taliban against the US and their allies.

Once again the world is being pushed to the brink in order satisfy the warmongering lunatics of the Bush administration. How many more people have to die before this lunacy is stopped by the rest of the peoples of the world?The world must say ‘No!’ to ‘intervention’ in Pakistan – and say it now before it’s too late.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Hezbollah, a Shia organisation based in Lebanon, organised a massive demonstration in Beirut yesterday in support of Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni organisation, and the people of the Gaza Strip who have been imprisoned in the enclave ever since Hamas regained control of the government from the corrupt Fatah organisation who had seized control after the election of Hamas in January 2006.

“It's of course true that Hamas--an arm of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood--is at odds ideologically with Shia Iran, and that Shia and Sunni seem inclined to dislike, even slaughter, each other elsewhere in the Middle East.”

In fact, it’s not true at all; Hamas receives support from Iran and, as has been recently demonstrated on the streets of Beirut, receives support from Hezbollah which also receives support from Iran. And, of course, Syria, whose population is about two-thirds Sunni, also has very close ties with Hezbollah (Shia) and is also supported by Iran (Shia). About the only place where thee has been any serious conflict between Sunni and Shia is in Iraq – and that’s for local political reasons only that have nothing to do with any religious differences between the two sects.

The old colonial ploy of ‘divide and rule’ by stirring up trouble between various political or religious/tribal groups has failed as far as the Zionists and their propagandists are concerned to the point where it has now actually back-fired them. Instead of succeeding in wedging the two Muslim sects, they’ve actually succeeded in uniting them.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The neocons are asking President Bush to commit one final act of gung-ho war before leaving office – to ‘liberate’ Zimbabwe. In typical warmongering style the neocons want the US to invade Zimbabwe to “secure a positive and lasting legacy in a country that has suffered under the boot of a megalomaniacal thug for decades”.

Never mind that the people are suffering; the neocons want Bush to invade in order to ‘secure a positive and lasting legacy’! In other words, they want Bush to invade so that it’ll make him look good. Bush has been in power for eight years, about the same time that Zimbabwe has been drifting from bad to worse, and the neocons want Bush to now put together a plan to invade, invade, and then ‘liberate’ Zimbabwe and do all this before 20 January just so that it’ll make him look good.

Setting one megalomaniacal thug against another will achieve about the same result as it did in Iraq.

The people of Zimbabwe don’t need ‘liberating’; they only need to have their President and his minions removed – then they need massive aid to get their country back on its feet. Every single member nation of the UN should contribute toward the task of ridding Zimbabwe of its President and his minions – except the U.S. whose government should be excluded entirely from any part of the rebuilding of Zimbabwe. Individual American private volunteers, however, should be made welcome.

Such an action by the world would demonstrate to those who are suffering in it that it does care about its fellow humankind and that we’d like to help out purely for the sake of helping out and not because it makes us look good or because the nations that needs the world’s help has something by way of valuable resources that the world’s Big Business wants to exploit.

Zimbabwe needs help. The last thing it needs is Blackwater type thugs to ‘liberate’ them or to have one lot of corrupt political gangsters replaced by another lot as per Afghanistan.

And the world certainly doesn’t need the neocons to tell us who needs ‘liberating’ and who doesn’t.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Foreign Minister and leader of the Kadima Party, has told students at a Tel Aviv high school that, once a Palestinian state has been created, Israeli Arabs should leave Israel to go and live in the new Palestinian state.

Her expectation is that, after centuries of living in their homelands in what is now Israel, what few Palestinians still remain there will be expected to join those that were made refugees back in 1948 in what little there is left of the West Bank and the Gaza Ghetto.

These are also the policies of the extreme right-wing Zionist parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party that are vying for government at the upcoming Israeli elections to be held next February. The only difference between the Kadima party and the Likud is that Likud, despite their current electioneering propaganda, will never allow a Palestinian state to exist but want to push the Israeli Arabs out from Israel anyway through fear of being overwhelmed demographically at some time in the future, while Kadima actually talk of creating some kind of Palestinian state out of what’s left of the West Bank and the Gaza.

The reality is that there will never be a Palestinian state if Likud has anything to do with it and there will never be a Palestinian state acceptable to Palestinians that does not involve right of return of the refugees to their homelands, much of which is in what is now Israel, and without a totally settler-free West Bank based on borders being at the 1967 Green Line. In other words, while the Israeli Zionists have any say in it, there will never be a Palestinian state.

Hardly an 'independent soverign state', is it? Palestinians are never likely to accept such demands and conditions, which, of course, Netanyahu is quite aware of.

The world should know that Israeli Zionists will NEVER accept ANY kind of Palestinian sovereign state and that the various Israeli political parties’ talk of ‘peace’ is just pure propaganda designed solely for the dumb and gullible masses and to extract every last dollar they can from the US government.

McCain and Lieberman both know very well that the Pakistan government is no position to do any such thing since to do so would be an admission that their own intelligence service, the ISI, was complicit in the Mumbai attacks.

Both India and Pakistan are nuclear armed nations and McCain’s barely veiled indirect prodding of India to attack is extremely dangerous. His actions are clearly designed to provoke Pakistan to the point that the US will need to intervene immediately after any Indian strike against Pakistan to prevent a Pakistani retaliation. The ultimate object of the exercise is for such a US intervention to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons which warhawks and neocons in the Bush administration have for years feared will fall into the hands of a radical Islamic Pakistani government at some time in the future if America’s puppet Musharraf were to lose power. Musharraf has now gone and the current government is far from stable. The threat of war between Pakistan and India over the Mumbai attacks could well be the catalyst the US need for intervention in Pakistan but they are treading a dangerous path in a place where escalation could explode long before any so-called ‘intervention’ can get off the ground.

Clearly, the entire scenario of the attack on Mumbai and the resultant tensions between India and Pakistan have been deliberately orchestrated by the US and other allies in order to preclude any of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of anti-American Islamic forces or a future radical Pakistan government.

Much of Bush’s push for war in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was based on evidence that was provided by Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, who in 1991, just after the end of the first Gulf War, was a senior general in the Iraqi army and in charge of all of Iraq’s WMDs. In 1995 when Hussein Kamel defected, he told his IAEA de-briefers in great detail all about the weapons that Saddam had and all about his plans to extend his WMD stockpiles prior to the Gulf War of 1991 and it was this information that Bush and the administration used directly to talk-up Saddam’s ‘threat to the world’ and his stockpile of WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What Bush and the administration neglected to mention when directly quoting the defectors list of Saddam’s WMDs was that Hussein Kamel had also told his de-briefers that he himself had personally gave the order and supervised the destruction of those same weapons just after the first Gulf War in 1991. Bush could not possibly have quoted the defector without also knowing that this same defector had also told of the destruction of those weapons. And if Bush didn’t know it was because those who were in a position to know failed to tell him because they knew that it was not what Bush would have wanted to hear.

Bush and his minions continue to lie and are determined to perpetuate the myth of Saddam’s WMDs as the casus belli for a war they knew was illegal and morally wrong but were determined to have nonetheless. Once the Bush Presidency is over their must be an inquiry into his role in the war and if crimes are found to have been committed then Bush and his accomplices, including Britain’s Tony Blair and Australia’s John Howard, should be made to face charges in the appropriate international court.

According to a Ha’aretz report Hamas, who govern the besieged Gaza Strip, are preventing Gazans from making their pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to attend Haj at Mecca.

This is a deliberate propaganda ploy that amounts to deceit bordering on lies.

The reality is this: Palestinian Authority (PA) President, Mahmoud Abbas, has used the Haj to gain a political advantage and demonise Hamas by taking advantage of his alliance with Israel and the US to get Saudi Arabia to accept only visas issued by the Abbas governed PA. Saudi Arabia will not accept visas issued by Hamas to Palestinians wanting to make Haj from Gaza. Hamas in not allowing its authority in the Gaza to be subverted by Abbas and what remains of his corrupt Fatah faction in the Gaza and has refused to allow some 3000 Gazans that have managed to obtain PA visas to leave unless a further 3000 Gazans who applied for visas through Hamas are also given visas by the Saudi government.

The ploy by Abbas and Fatah is a deliberately contrived attempt by Israel to yet again divide the interests of the Palestinian people generally and isolate further the Gazan Palestinians in particular.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

With only around ten weeks to go before the Israelis go to the polls in February 2009, Israeli settlers in the West Bank seem intent on provoking as much friction between themselves and Palestinians as possible. This provocation has been deliberately orchestrated by the Zionist settler movement in conjunction with the Likud and other right-wing pro-settler Zionist parties together with the connivance of the IDF who have shown overt reluctance to quell the settler violence against Palestinians and to evict the settlers from Hebron.

The reason for this deliberate provocation, and the subsequent publicity the settlers are getting, is to highlight to the rest of the Israeli population that there is still a powerful Zionist movement determined to make the West Bank a part of Greater Israel and to deny the Palestinian people any possibility of any form of sovereign state.

With Likud now running ahead in the polls, it seems that the settler violence has been designed specifically to make Zionist expansionism a major issue in the upcoming elections and for a post-election Netanyahu government. While there may yet be an, albeit reluctant, IDF crackdown on the violence, any crackdown will also be likely to attract sympathy for the settlers and the notion of a Greater Israel. This, coupled with the increasingly volatile situation in the Gaza Strip, all adds up to favour Israel’s right-wing.

A Netanyahu-led government will spell the end of all Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state and instead will usher in a program of greatly increased Palestinian persecution and oppression coupled with an invasion and evacuation of the Gaza Strip followed by its eventual reoccupation by Israeli settlers.

The violence by the settlers in the West Bank is but a prelude of things to come when Netanyahu becomes Israel’s next Prime Minister.

There is a gross misconception that is being pushed by right-wing Western extremists that Islamaphobia is not racism. Furthermore, among right-wing Zionists there is even a push to assert that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semite.

Western right-wing extremists that are Islamaphobic argue simplistically that Islam is not a race and, therefore, it cannot be racist to be Islamaphobic. They ignore that discrimination against people because of their religion and/or culture is as much racist as discriminating against people because of their blood and biology.

Quite aside from the fact that Judaism embraces both a race and a religion, whereas Islam is strictly a religion, anti-Semitism is different than other forms of prejudice or racism. Whereas the racist view of blacks, for example, holds that they are "below" whites, anti-Semites think Jews are planning to rule the world. The Israel Lobby by American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is just one example of this viewpoint.

Firstly, Mearsheimer and Walt quite emphatically do not suggest that “Jews are planning to rule the world” as Heni deceitfully infers. They merely suggest that the Israel Lobby, which includes non-Jews such as Christian Zionists and neoconservatives and other pro-Israel Zionists who are not Jewish, wield an extraordinary amount of influence over US foreign policy with regard to the Middle East generally and the affairs of Israel particularly.

Nor is it entirely true to say that “Judaism embraces both a race and a religion…” Not all practitioners of Judaism are actually ‘Jewish’ by race yet it is quite properly accepted that to discriminate against people that call themselves ‘Jewish’ by religion and culture because they or, more likely, their ancestors converted to Judaism for what ever reason, is racism.

Zionism, however, doesn’t fall into any ‘racism’ category. Zionism is a right-wing political ideology that embraces Israeli nationalism and a notion of a Greater Israel that precludes Arabs (which, in itself, is racist). The fact that many, but certainly not all, of Zionism’s adherents happen to be Jewish is in fact incidental. Zionism is not a ‘race’, nor is it a ‘religion’ and it is not a ‘culture’ – it’s an ideology.

Heni also becomes confused with regards to how anti-Semites view Jews. He argues on one hand that anti-Semites do not view Jews in the same way as, “for example”, white racists view blacks, which is as being, as Heni says, “below” whites, yet in the very next paragraph Heni writes:

Anti-Semitism was the motif for the Holocaust. Those unprecedented crimes combined religious Jew-hatred, quasi-scientific racial theories, and modern anti-Semitism in all its forms, including a comprehensive worldview.

Those “quasi-scientific racial theories” were based around the Nazi perception that many races that were non-Germanic or Aryan races, including, but not exclusively, Jews, were “untermenschen” (sub-human). Those perceptions of racism, not just anti-Semitism, were the blueprint upon which the Holocaust were perpetrated; indeed, it was what made anti-Semitism no different at all from other “forms of prejudice or racism” as Heni otherwise says.

Contrary to Heni’s view that the Holocaust somehow made anti-Semitism unique, Heni should be aware that had Hitler prevailed over the USSR, the number of European Jewry that perished would have paled against the slaughter that Hitler and Himmler had planned for the peoples of Russia and the Slavic nations. The point is that the Holocaust wasn’t just about European Jewry; it was about what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Germanic and Nordic races relative to virtually all other races.

Despite Heni’s view that ‘anti-Semitism isn’t the same as Islamaphobia’, from the point of view that anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia are both resultants of discriminatory attitudes, they are exactly the same – they are both very much racist.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Barack Obama has made it abundantly clear that, instead of offering real change in US foreign policy and a realignment of US standing in the world, he will instead maintain the status quo of overt US militancy and superpower dominance as he pursues the same foreign policy objectives as George W. Bush and the neoconservatives.

In announcing his national security team, Obama told his audience that, while he believes “16 months is the right time frame” for the ‘withdrawal process’ from Iraq, he leaves the door open for continued occupation by adding “We will have to remain vigilant in making sure that any terrorist elements that remain in Iraq do not become strengthened as a consequence of our drawdown”.

By ‘terrorist elements’ Obama, just as Bush and his neocon supporters have done for the past five years, means anyone who dares rise up and challenge the US-approved and sponsored Iraqi government. Given the reality of the Iraqi geo-political landscape which guarantees that there will always be strife in Iraq while there is any semblance whatsoever of any US influence in Iraqi politics, then Americans can look forward to many more years of some level of occupation in Iraq and, therefore, many more lives of US soldiers being lost as a result.

And, of course, the bogeyman, Osama bin Laden, together with his al Qaeda organisation, will continue to be perpetuated by the President-elect as the Emmanuel Goldstein mythical enemy of the Western World. Obama tells us that “…we're going to have to mobilize our resources and focus [our] attention on defeating Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and any other extremist groups that intend to target American citizens”.

The arrogance of American exceptionalism seems also to have caught up with Obama as he tells the world: “We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends. We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in the defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world. Democracy and justice, opportunity and unyielding hope because American values are America's greatest export to the world.”

Significantly, Obama didn’t commit at all to a Palestinian state but, instead, talked of “…seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians”, though didn’t elaborate on whose or what terms such a peace might come about.

At the end of his announcing of his national security team one is left wondering if anything has really changed at all despite the wishes of the American people – and the world. He did mention diplomacy one or twice but that was about the only difference between Bush’s policies and what seems to be Obama’s.

Monday, December 01, 2008

The first sentence in Blair’s piece this morning tends to sum up exactly what the extreme right-wing mainstream media propagandists are actually all about. He writes:‘Confronted by Islamic evil, blame-shy over-educated peaceniks are inclined to shelter behind complexity.’

First off, the use of the phrase ‘Islamic evil’ exposes the typical Blair/Bolt-style right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobic racism while, secondly, the suggestion that the analysis of geo-political realities could actually cause people to stop and think about what is going on around them threatens the simplistic Blair/Bolt propaganda of the ‘they hate us for our values’ meme that appeals so effortlessly to the their dumb and gullible supporters who seem to hate ‘complexity’ as much as they do Muslims.

Blair reinforces the ‘let’s keep it simple’ approach with this: ‘But terrorism isn’t complex. It’s the simple work of murderous simpletons’. How wrong can he be?

‘Terrorism’ in the Blair/Bolt construct (I use the word ‘construct’ deliberately and provocatively here because it has an intellectual academic ring about it which really gets up the under-educated warmongers noses) is a one-sided affair that ignores entirely the terror that the West unleashes against the peoples of Islam whom they have been murdering for years in vast numbers.

Blair provides an example of ‘terrorism’ to demonstrate how ‘simplistic’ it is:

At 10 pm on Wednesday, an unsuspecting Thakur Budhabhai Waghela, 33, a sweeper employed at GT Hospital, was sitting down for his dinner when there was a knock on the door.When he opened the door, a stranger asked him for water to drink. After having the glass of water offered to him, the stranger shot Waghela dead at point-blank range in front of his six-year-old son, Yash.

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night."The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

One wonders how ‘complex’ Blair’s explanation would be he attempted to justify this terrorist attack.

The Blair/Bolt simplistic propaganda technique is designed specifically for consumption by the dumb and gullible and their small minded warmongering flock of equally simplistic followers.

UPDATE

I tried to leave a post at Blair’s blog but Blair’s assistant, the child-like Tran, reckons I’ve been banned for some unknown reason. In stating that, Tran has decided to imitate a sheep by childishly using the letter ‘a’ multiple times. Naturally, like sheep, Blair’s Bloggies, totally incapable of any original thought of their own, let alone argument, have decided to do the same by abusing their right to post comments while I am unable to respond.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
All material on this site is available for use without permission but it would be appreciated if the source is acknowledged.